Middle England

THE BOOK EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT The TimesFrom Post Industrial Birmingham To The London Riots And The Current Political Gridlock, Middle England Takes In Family, Literature And Love In A Comedy For Our Times GuardianCoe Is Anextraordinarily Deft Plotterthe Book Zips Alonghe Tackles Big Ambitious Themes,in This Case The Effect Of Politics On People S Lives, And Political Opinions On Personal Relations Mail On SundayInMiddle England,Coe Shows An Understanding Of This Country That Goes Beyond What Most Cabinet Ministers Can Muster He Subtly Builds A Picture That Exposes The Cracks In Societyhe Is A Master Of Satire But Pokes Fun Subtly, Without Ever Being Cruel, Biting Or Blatanthis Light, Funny Writing Makes You Feel Better Evening StandardMiddle England Is Afull Blooded State Of The Nation Novel, And It Brings Us Bang Up To Date Sunday TimesSlickstylishly Engineeredyou Marvel At The Extraordinary Attention To Detail SpectatorWhat Is Striking About Coe Is Not So Much His Flight From Enghlishness As His Ambivalent Embrace Of It Financial TimesAnastute, Enlightened And Enlighteningjourney Into The Heart Of Our Current National Identity Crisis Both Moving And Funny As We D Expect From CoeThe First Great Brexit NovelLet Me Add To The Chorus Of Praise ForJonathan Coe S New BookMiddle EnglandEasily My Favourite Of His SinceWhat A Carve Up , Which Did For Thatcherism WhatMiddle Englanddoes For BrexitBrilliant Read It Too Fast, Finished It Too SoonCoe S Comic Critique Of A Divided Country DazzlesProperly Laugh Out Loud Funny It Is Alsoincisive And Brilliantabout Our Divided Country And The Deep Chasms Revealed By The Vote To LeaveDo Not Miss The BooksellerSublimely Good Funny, Tender, Human And Intelligent The State Of The Brexit Nation Novel To End Them All Jonathan Coe S Best SinceWhat A Carve Up A Copper Bottomed MasterpieceProbably The Best English Novelist Of His GenerationNo Modern Novelist Is Better At Charting The Precariousness Of Middle Class Life ObserverAn Angry And Exuberant Book Sunday Times On Number Jonathan Coe Has Established Himself As One Of The Most Entertaining Chroniclers Of Our Times TatlerBeginning Eight Years Ago On The Outskirts Of Birmingham, Where Car Factories Have Been Replaced By Poundland, And London, Where Frenzied Riots Give Way To Olympic Fever, Middle England Follows A Brilliantly Vivid Cast Of Characters Through A Time Of Immense Change There Are Newlyweds Ian And Sophie, Who Disagree About The Future Of The Country And, Possibly, The Future Of Their Relationship Doug, The Political Commentator Who Writes Impassioned Columns About Austerity From His Chelsea Townhouse, And His Radical Teenage Daughter Who Will Stop At Nothing In Her Quest For Social Justice Benjamin Trotter, Who Embarks On An Apparently Doomed New Career In Middle Age, And His Father Colin, Whose Last Wish Is To Vote In The European Referendum And Within All These Lives Is The Story Of Modern England A Story Of Nostalgia And Delusion Of Bewilderment And Barely Suppressed RageFollowing In The Footsteps Of The Rotters Club And The Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe S New Novel Is The Novel For Our Strange New Times

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Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961 His novels include What a Carve Up , The House of Sleep, The Rotters Club, The Rain Before It Falls and Number 11 He has won many literary prizes at home and abroad, and his biography of the writer BS Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant, won the Samuel Johnson Prize Feature films have been made of his novels The Dwarves of Death as Five Seconds To Spare and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim as La vie trs prive de Monsieur Sim The Rotters Club was adapted for BBC television in 2005, starring Sarah Lancashire, Alice Eve and Kevin Doyle.In 2017 he published a novella for children, The Broken Mirror.Hie latest novel, MIDDLE ENGLAND, published by Penguin in November 2018, reintroduces characters from The Rotters Club and puts them against a background of real events in the UK before and after the Brexit referendum.